Indiana's Redistricting Surrender Illustrates Why Primaries Matter
... the Hoosier State’s Republican-controlled Senate shot down efforts to pass a new congressional map seeking to boost their party’s share of seats heading into the 2026 midterms...
Despite holding a supermajority in the upper chamber, 21 of the Senate’s 40 Republican senators joined Democrats in defeating the proposed map (31-19)...
While Democrats with razor-thin margins in blue states like Virginia are willing to seemingly violate the law to pass gerrymandered maps in their party’s favor, fake red states like Indiana can’t even be bothered to legally use their supermajorities to do the same...
... Indiana’s bungled redistricting gambit underscores an important feature of the electoral system that many GOP voters have long ignored: the primary process...
The entire reason feckless Republicans believe they can continue to get away with the type of betrayal exemplified in the Hoosier State is that they don’t fear electoral accountability from the GOP base...
It’s a nationwide problem witnessed at every level of government, in which gutless RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) routinely stab their base in the back but face no repercussions at the ballot box...
The only way this can happen is if Republican voters rediscover what it means to be a self-governing people...
Related
Is the Indiana Redistricting Debacle the Future of MAGA? by W. James Antle III, American Conservative, 14 December 2025.
Republicans are Facing an Extinction Event, by Brian C. Joondeph, American thinker, 15 December 2025.
The Right Has a Republicans Problem - Saboteurs within do more damage than opponents without, by Theophilus Chilton, 15 December 2025:
A few weeks ago, I gave the Republican Party some unsolicited advice about what they should do if they want to get back into the saddle and start winning elections again after this year’s string of off-season/special election losses. Essentially it boiled down to using power to fight the Democrats while giving your own client base the things that it wants... The Democrats, despite their complete disconnection from several basic facets of reality, understand this principle and apply it effectively. The Republicans, on the other hand, are absolutely abysmal at doing anything for their putative base... As a group, they will routinely use “democracy” as an excuse to not actually do democracy...
The Republican Party, both nationally and the state level, has been handed once more the opportunity to fundamentally alter the direction of this country in a way favourable to restoring some sanity, in the very least. Yet, they refuse to take it...
After all, what are we to make of Republicans in Indiana refusing to redistrict to take away seats from the Democrats? This is merely counteracting what Democrats have been doing for decades. The Democrats probably hold 20-30 seats in the US House of Representatives that they have no business having were it not for actual gerrymandering...
But intellectual stultification? That’s a whole different level of problem. And I’m convinced that’s what going on here, by and large. If the GOP seems like it can’t offer anything but policy solutions that were last viable around 1995, that’s because these GOPers themselves are still stuck in 1995...
But ok, assuming there IS still a political solution to be had, what is it? Well, it’s to destroy the Republican Party, both from the inside and from without, and replace it with something in which the NeoCons and tone-deaf libertardians have been exorcised...